No Exit

By Sean Flynn

Wildfires rage throughout the summer in the Southwest, but the one that swept through Yarnell, Arizona, in late June was different. It began humbly but quickly became unpredictable, burning for days across thousands of acres. And so the Granite Mountain hotshots — a young crew of specialist wildfire fighters — were called in. Within hours, nineteen of the twenty men were trapped and hopelessly overrun by the blaze. Sean Flynn explains how a routine assignment resulted in the greatest loss of firefighters since 9/11.

The Lookout

The fire crawls north along the ridge, as it has for almost two days, burning a long black scar through the chaparral. From a half mile away, Brendan McDonough has a clear view of the eastern flank, a bright slash of orange beneath a tumble of gray smoke, and he can see his crew high on the slope to the south, cutting a clean line through unburned juniper and scrub oaks on the last day of June.

McDonough is the lookout, and it's his job to keep his eyes on both the fire and his crew. A wildfire isn't extinguished so much as choked into submission by encircling it with a perimeter cleared of fuel. Roads and rivers can be useful, but most of the firebreak has to be created with brute force: by bulldozers in favorable terrain and by men with chain saws and hand tools everywhere else. To do that safely, those crews, like McDonough's Granite Mountain hotshots, need to know where the fire is and where it might reasonably be expected to go, and that often requires posting a lookout somewhere with a better view.

McDonough, whose name everyone on the crew clips to Donut, cut line in the morning. But the flames twitched and flared as the day got hotter and breezier, so he was dispatched to keep watch over the fire's flank. By late morning every man working the hills around the little town of Yarnell, Arizona, could see thunderheads rising to the north, too. If the wind shifts, if the flames break in another direction or run back to the south, Donut's responsible for providing the heads-up.

Sole survivor Brendan McDonough (a.k.a. Donut) says of theattempts to cast blame: "Nineteen guys made that decision." At 2:30, the fire is still chewing north. Behind it, the Granite Mountain men are working deliberately, sawing and trenching a line along the scarred edge, doubling back to reinforce it, then leapfrogging ahead. Their superintendent, Eric Marsh, is a cautious firefighter, as are most hotshots who want to continue being hotshots. He'll turn down any assignment he thinks is too risky for his men. He's always a professional, though, always figures out a safer way to accomplish the same goal. He never says, "No, we're not gonna do this, go fuck yourself," Donut knows. He always says, "We won't do that. But we will do this for you." Most important: Marsh's men, all nineteen of them, always make it home.

Donut loves Eric Marsh. He loves every man on his crew, even the rookies he's just getting to know, but especially his super. Marsh hired Donut more than two years ago now, when probably only the burger joints in Prescott would have. He'd always wanted to be a firefighter, and he'd taken all the basic courses, had the proper certifications. But he was also a pothead with a petty record, had just done a short time in jail a few months earlier, and smoked even more weed when he got out. Then his daughter was born, in March 2011. I put the fear of God in myself to be successful,he remembers. I wouldn't be shit to my daughter if I didn't do this.

So Donut went to Station 7in Prescott, where the hotshots were headquartered. He knew a couple of guys from an EMT class he'd taken at a community college in Yavapai, and he'd overheard them mention Granite Mountain was hiring. But those guys knew him, too, the stoned kid. No jobs, they told him.

"Actually," Marsh interrupted, "we do have an opening. Can you do an interview?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you do it right now?"

McDonough was wearing work boots, dirty work pants, a dirty white tank top. "Yes," he said.

Every hotshot carries a fire shelter—a big foil pouch linedwith silica-thread cloth. Marsh asked when he'd last told a lie. He always asked that question; if a person can't be honest about his dishonesty, he's probably not worth hiring. McDonough told him he'd lied to his mom not long ago about what time he'd come home. He told Marsh about his record. He told him he'd smoked dope recently. He told him he had no wildfire experience. Marsh hired him anyway. He seen something in me that no one else saw.He gave me a shot no one else would've—to be a better person, to be a better dad.

On June 30, Donut is three months into his third fire season. Just before four o'clock, he checks the weather, as he does every hour, recording the temperature and the wind and the humidity, all of which can change the way a fire behaves. He gets word, too, that the National Weather Service is warning about approaching storm winds that will blow over the fire at forty miles an hour.

Donut clicks his radio, says he copies on the weather. Marsh cuts in, says he copies, too. Donut finishes his check, looks at the fire, considers his crewmates on the faraway slope, looks back toward the fire. Already it's shifted, jabbing back toward him now instead of north, flames leaping in hiccup spurts. The front is moving fast. It crosses the trigger point he's set for himself, the spot in the medium distance that tells him it's time to move.

He hikes 120 yards downslope, toward a clearing around an abandoned road grader. As he walks, Donut searches for a new lookout position as well as patches of earth where he can deploy his fire shelter if everything goes to shit. Every hotshot carries a shelter, a big foil pouch lined with silica-thread cloth, and every hotshot identifies rock outcrops or clearings where he can crawl into it if, God forbid, he's trapped by advancing flames. But hotshots rarely deploy their shelters. They know, by experience and habit, how to get to the safe zones.

The Granite Mountain buggies the crew had driven from Prescott are parked a mile away on a dirt road called Sesame Street, and they're suddenly in the path of the shifting fire. So Donut catches a ride from a guy from another hotshot crew, and they move them out of the way, closer to town. Flames are whipping across the ridges, and fat embers fall through heavy smoke, slopping over the lines, setting spot fires. Donut takes refuge in a roadside café. He radios Marsh, tells him the buggies are safe. "Call me if you need anything," he says, "and I'll see you soon."

The Most Beautiful Thing

Hotshots are invariably referred to as elite firefighters, which suggests years of training, high-end equipment, and a mastery of the mechanics of wildfires.But none of that is required. The entry-level qualifications are a few dozen hours of classroom instruction and a decent level of fitness, and the primary tools are chain saws and Pulaskis, a speciality tool combining an ax and an adze. Hotshots also tend to be young—the average age of the Granite Mountain crew is 27, a number skewed by Marsh, who's 43—and few of them make a long career out of it.

Of course, the veterans—the superintendents and captains and squad bosses—understand fire behavior. They know, as most hotshots will learn, that one fuel will burn hotter than another, and that some white streaks in the sky are more worrisome than others, and how to precisely saw into a towering black tree trunk so that it falls exactly where it needs to. But that's all teachable craft.

What makes hotshots elite is that they're so damned tough. Physically, yes, because they do hard labor with, at a minimum, a forty-pound pack on their backs, and they do it on billy-goat slopes and at the bottom of canyons and on the tops of mountains, and they almost always double-time hike a few miles to get there first. But they're also mentally tough, because they're able to do that for sixteen hours, sleep in the dirt, then get up and do it for another sixteen hours, day after day after day, without dwelling on, or at least not surrendering to, the fact that what they're doing is often quite miserable.

The Granite Mountain superintendent, Eric Marsh (right), was hired in 2003and went on to lead and reshape the Prescott Fire Department'sfledgling wildland division. They're aware of it, certainly. "The reason we're so close," Donut told me, "is you're fucking put through some shit." There is camaraderie in the drudgery, and that is, for a certain type of person, much of the allure. For five months a year, April into October, hotshots travel and eat and sleep and wake and sweat together. They work fourteen-day assignments if they're lucky, twenty-one days if they're luckier (overtime pay adds up), take two days off, then go back out again. They travel the country, following the fire season as it moves from the Southeast to the West and then north, and they work primarily in the deep and unseen wilds.

That's why Pat McCarty signed on in the spring of '05—to travel. "I was going to get to see places in this country most people never see," he says. In five seasons—he transferred to the city side of the Prescott Fire Department in 2010—he fought wildfires in every state west of the Mississippi and most of the Southeast. And he did see things most people will never see, spectacular and wondrous things, made even more so by how hard he labored to see them. "You're working your balls off all day with nineteen other guys, they're all as miserable as you are, you're cutting fire lines all day," he says. And at the end of one of those days, you'll cut a line that ties in with another on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and then you'll sit on the edge, legs dangling. The sky will be tangerine and persimmon to the west, and an atmospheric inversion will trap all the smoke in the canyon below, so you will see only gray until, every few minutes, a smoldering log will break loose and crash into the depths and explode like fireworks.

Bombproof

The Yarnell Hill fire had been touched off by a lightning strike Friday evening, June 28, which is not an uncommon occurrence in this part of Arizona at this time of year. The monsoon season begins in June, when the southern desert bakes and the dry air rises; moist air from the gulfs of Mexico and California flows in behind it and gathers into thunderheads that rumble north over the Mogollon Rim and the Bradshaw Mountains. Sometimes they dump great buckets of rain, and sometimes they only streak the sky with virgas, but they almost always bring lightning and wind.

The Friday storm, the first of the monsoon season, ignited at least seven fires in central Arizona, including the one on the ridge west of Yarnell. Those slopes and canyons hadn't burned since 1966, so they were thick with chaparral, in places ten feet high and impassably dense and all of it desiccated by years of drought. But the lightning had flashed into a field of boulders where the vegetation was thin. By dusk, the small fire appeared to be mostly out after having burned less than half an acre.

But the wind kicked up Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday morning, the fire is aggressive and ornery, having sprawled across at least 300 acres, maybe 500, in just the past fifteen hours.The supervisors gather at seven o'clock at the Yarnell fire station, along with a fire-behavior analyst and sheriff's deputies from Yavapai County. Eric Marsh is there, too.

Marsh was one of the earlier hires in the Prescott Fire Department's wildland division. The division had been formed in 2001 as a team of seasonal workers to thin out the Ponderosa pines and chaparral that grow right up to and across the city limits, potential fuel that offcials had long worried might lure wildfire into urban neighborhoods. In 2003 the team was evolving into a grunt-level "Type 2" firefighting crew. That's when Marsh, who'd worked as a hotshot for a decade, was brought on. "I wanted someone who could lead it," says Darrell Willis, who was the fire chief at the time. "He had the experience, and that's where his heart was."

Marsh thought Prescott could do better. He wanted a "Type 1" crew—hotshot status. It was an audacious notion, unprecedented: There were more than one hundred hotshot crews scattered across the county, most run by one federal agency or another, but precisely zero attached to municipal fire departments. Still, he was determined. "I don't know how to explain it, but the first time I met him, I wanted to be on his good side," says Phillip "Mondo" Maldonado, who worked six seasons with Granite Mountain. "He didn't say much, but what he did say, he said a lot in it. Every word he said, you'd better listen."

By 2007, Marsh's crew was granted trainee status. The new name, granite mountain, was stenciled on the buggies, with room left over for hot shots to be added later. All the men were aware they were in a tough spot, a city crew trying to make the leap to Type 1. "We were in the fishbowl, you know?" Mondo says. "And Eric understood that. He didn't want us to be, like, Yeah, we got this. He wanted us to be nice people." Marsh's men tucked in their shirts; they didn't spit in camp; they wiped the sink after they washed up. Waitresses and strangers were "ma'am" and "sir." "And you let the work do the talking," Mondo says. "If you did a badass piece of line and it held, that was it."

A year later, on a fire in the Klamath National Forest, Marsh gathered his men for the morning briefing. His cell phone rang. He didn't say much—"Yeah, okay"—before he hung up and marched to his truck, a Ford F-250 with a T for "trainee" stuck next to the Granite Mountain script. He peeled it off with his knife, turned to his crew. "You guys earned this," he said. "I'm proud of you." Then he led them on a long hike into a bowl, where they felled trees and mopped up hot spots until dusk.

"It was awesome," Mondo says. "But he didn't blow confetti for us. He didn't give us a day off. It was like, we got here, so let's keep going."

At the Sunday-morning meeting in Yarnell, the supervisors go over the resources coming in—engines, water tenders, aircraft, another crew called the Blue Ridge hotshots—and they study the terrain using Google Maps on an iPad. In the satellite imagery, halfway between Yarnell and the fire, they can see a beige smudge where the vegetation has been manually cleared around the Boulder Springs Ranch. It will make an excellent safety zone. "Bombproof," one of the supervisors calls it.

Sunday Morning

An hour after the supervisors convene, the Granite Mountain hotshots leave their buggies along Sesame Street, then go on foot farther up to where the chaparral closes in and Marsh has parked his own truck. He tells his men the weather is expected to be hot and windy, and he gives them their assignments. Marsh will take three or four to the top of the ridge to build an anchor point at the heel of the fire—that is, cut a line so clean and thorough that the flames can't double back. The rest of the crew, meanwhile, will set backfires from a two-track road, a controlled burn to remove fuel and hem in the wildfire.

Twenty men in hard hats and yellow Nomex shirts start hiking single file and uphill for the next forty-five minutes. Four of them are rookies, working only their third big fire. One, Grant McKee, almost didn't make it at all: He'd missed the cut at hiring time, got on only when another guy dropped out. His cousin Robert Caldwell is a squad boss on the crew, but McKee doesn't expect to stay long enough to move up the ranks. He wants to be a firefighter on the structure side, putting out flaming buildings, or maybe a paramedic; he figures he'll do one season with Granite Mountain, then go back to school.

He loves the work, though. McKee grew up an only child, but now it's like he has nineteen brothers. He's not the biggest guy on the crew, but he's strong, likes to sweat, likes being in hotshot shape; when he comes home, he tells his fiancée, Leah Fine, to feel his arms, flexing and grinning. A tough cookie,Fine calls him. A badass.

McKee and Fine had dinner together the night before at the Prescott Brewing Company, a pub across the street from the county courthouse. Though they'd lived together for more than a year, the fire season made it feel like they'd just started dating, what with him being gone so much. At home, McKee laid out his clothes like he always did, folded and stacked in reverse order of how they'd go on, pants at the bottom, underwear on top, socks draped over his boots. He dozed off with Fine until their housemate, another newcomer to Granite Mountain, Kevin Woyjeck, came home and their dog, Derek,started barking, woke him up. But he got Derek settled down, then fell asleep with his arm around his fiancée. He'd kissed her good-bye before sunrise.

After a forty-five-minute hike, McKee and most of the crew prepare to burn out from the two-track. Donut breaks off with Marsh and the short squad, following the charred perimeter of the fire until they reach cold black, where nothing is smoldering and the heat has dissipated. They scrape a line two feet wide down to mineral earth, cut away any fuel another foot from either side, dig a cup trench on the downslope side to catch anything that might roll into the chaparral below, and they keep doing that until they've tied in with the cold black. It's a good anchor, solid and secure.

The temperature rises, and the humidity drops, and the fire is picking up. Storm clouds prowl to the north. A supervisor in operations wants to know if Marsh can see the thunderheads through the smoke. He can. He says he'll keep watch on them.

At 11:36, an air tanker drops retardant on the backfires Granite Mountain has been setting all morning. Nine minutes later another tanker dumps another load, compounding the error. Marsh isn't happy his plan got screwed, but he's flexible. He tells his crew to make a direct attack instead, to cut line close along the fire's eastern flank. To keep an eye on them as they edge closer to the fire, Donut is appointed lookout.

The Shift

Cool air falls from thunderheads as storms dissipate their energy, and when that air reaches the ground it becomes a horizontal wind that can blow at tremendous speeds. These are called outflow winds, and they gust ahead of the moving storm, creating an outflow boundary. That, in turn, is preceded by surly changes in atmospheric pressure.

The pressure front ahead of the storm cell reaches the northern end of the Yarnell Hill fire at about 3:50. It is not unexpected—the National Weather Service out of Flagstaff issued a warning at 2:02 in the afternoon, and then again at 3:26—but it has a stunning effect. The great cloud of smoke leaning north begins to straighten. It rises, rears back, like a soft gray giant gently stretching its back. Then it begins to rotate to the east, twisted by the incoming front. Flames surge below the smoke, frenzied in the wind. A fire that had crawled north-northeast for two days, trailing a long, flaming edge the way a boat leaves a wake, quickly turns ninety degrees; the two-mile flank of Yarnell Hill is now a monstrous head of fire, wide and furious and picking up speed.

Donut can see the fire has changed course in the distance. The flames hit his trigger point at about 3:50. He's not worried—hotshots set trigger points so they don't have to worry—but protocol and prudence tell him to move.

He radios Jesse Steed, Granite Mountain's captain, a big man who taught close combat in the Marine Corps and has a dozen years of hotshot experience. "Okay, cool," Steed says. A few minutes later, after Donut has hiked down to the grader in the clearing, Steed radios again. "I've got eyes on you and the fire," Steed says. "And it's making a good push."

Steed and seventeen Granite Mountain hotshots are on a boulder face in the burned-out black along the ridge. Marsh is nearby, hiking down from the peak of the ridge, where he's been scouting and watching Donut and his crew. He's already checked in with command, confirmed he was aware of the incoming weather, reported that the winds at the peak of the ridge were getting "squirrelly."

The crew have a clear view of the fire to the north, raging eastward. But they seem calm, relaxed. On his radio, Donut can hear Steed and Marsh deciding what to do, whether to stay in the black—the already burned-out areas—or reposition somewhere else. Chris MacKenzie, 30 years old, son of a California firefighter, working his third season with Granite Mountain and his tenth as a hotshot, catches a fragment of that conversation when he shoots a short video, panning the crew in the foreground, the fire far in the background. There is no tension in their voices.

Hotshot Wade Parker sent his mother a photo of the shifting Yarnell blaze. At 4:04, a hotshot named Wade Parker texts a photo to his mom. This thing is runnin straight for yarnell jus starting evac,he types.You can see the fires on the left town on the right.

About that same time, Leah Fine sends a text to Grant McKee. Wish I could come kidnap you and take you away, she writes.

Please do, he texts back. I dare you.

Then she reminds him not to forget sunscreen.

The incident commanders have established three trigger points for backing away from the fire. When it hits the first, the town of Yarnell should be evacuated. It is assumed that will take an hour. At the second trigger, the firefighters are supposed to retreat. At the third, no one should be anywhere near Yarnell.

The fire hits the first trigger at about a quarter past four. It overruns the second at 4:22, and eight minutes later—not an hour, as expected—it hits the third. The fire has ripped across a mile of chaparral in fifteen minutes. Smoke turns day into night, and embers are blowing even farther ahead of the main front, touching off spot fires that quickly spread and gather into larger burns.

No Exit

The Granite Mountain hotshots leave the boulder face in the black a few minutes after four o'clock. Marsh is part of a brief three-way discussion on the radio about whether back-burning from a bulldozer line is still an option (it's not), and he adds that his crew is going to move. "I want to pass on that we're going to make our way to our escape route," he tells the superintendent for the Blue Ridge hotshots.

"You guys are in the black, correct?"

"Yeah," Marsh answers, "we're picking our way through the black…going out toward the ranch."

The Blue Ridge super assumes Granite Mountain is marching north, through burned-out chaparral and toward one of the ranches up in that area. But they're going almost the opposite direction, southeast, along the two-track where they set their backfires in the morning. They stay in the safe black for about a mile, until they reach a saddle at the top of a box canyon. At the bottom of that canyon is Boulder Springs Ranch, the safe zone they'd identified at the morning briefing, the one that is supposed to be "bombproof." Granite Mountain could continue hiking the two-track, which eventually curls east toward the ranch. But Boulder Springs looks so close from the saddle. It's actually more than a half mile away, all of it thick with unburned fuel.

The fire is still burning a fair distance north of the crew. The smoke has changed direction, but it's not coming toward them. The sky before them is clear. Granite Mountain begins to bushwhack down into the canyon. The slope is gentle near the top, but it drops off steeply, littered with big boulders and dense with chaparral. It takes a while for the hotshots to descend, and as they go lower the canyon wall to their left rises between them and the fire. They almost certainly lose sight of the flames before they get to the bottom of the bowl.

The outflow boundary pushes into the northern end of the fire at 4:18. Downdrafts slam to the ground, lash around the ridges and knobs, twisting and swirling and concentrating, sweeping fire through canyons and bowls and wherever else the air finds passage.

Twelve minutes later, about the time the Granite Mountain hotshots are nearing the floor of the canyon, the boundary reaches the southern end of the fire. It's right above them.

Marsh watches a plane fly over, one of the air-attack supervisors tracing a flight path for a big tanker, a modified DC-10, to spread retardant. Marsh calls the pilot at 4:37. "Division Alpha, that's exactly what we're looking for," he says. "That's where we want the retardant." There is no trace of stress in his voice.

The outflow winds rush around the ridges and into the canyons at fifty miles an hour, pushing the fire in new and erratic directions.

The pilot above circles, still lining up a path for the tanker, talking with operations supervisors on the ground and the tanker pilot in the air. At 4:39, a transmission crackling with static interrupts.

"Breaking in on Arizona 16, [this is] Granite Mountain hotshots, we are in front of the flaming front."

The transmissions don't make sense, not at first: Last anyone had heard, Granite Mountain was in the black, moving to a safe zone. But in the background, through the static and the wind, everyone listening can hear the growling whine of chain saws.

"Yeah, I'm here with Granite Mountain hotshots," Marsh says. His voice is stressed now. "Our escape route has been cut off." On three sides are boulder-strewn slopes too steep to quickly climb. The ridge above them is on fire, and a wall of flame is screaming into the mouth of the canyon. "We are preparing a deployment site, and we are burning out around ourselves in the brush, and I'll give you a call when we are under the sh…the shelters."

"Okay, copy that," the pilot says. "So you're on the south side of the fire, then?"

Marsh screams his answer. "Affrm!"

The crew have two minutes, maybe, to clear a space for their fire shelters. They throw their fuel cans and other combustibles as far into the brush as they can, and they stretch out close to one another the way they'd trained, rookies in the center, veterans on the outside, feet facing the oncoming fire. Not everyone gets turned the right way, and not everyone makes it under his shelter. It won't matter. Outflow winds sweep into the canyon at gale force. Fire rushes in like floodwater, filling every space, consuming every branch and leaf and blade of grass. The flames are seventy feet long, fed by air moving so fast that they are blown almost horizontal. They burn at 2,000 degrees. Granite slabs crack in the heat. Human lungs can survive one, maybe two breaths of 300-degree air.

The air-attack pilot calls Granite Mountain seven times over the next four minutes. No one answers.

Nineteen

Conrad Jackson is an acting captain with the Prescott Fire Department. He's 43 and cut his teeth on wildfires, three seasons with the Prescott National Forest hotshots back in the '90s, after he got his teaching degree but couldn't, just then, face the idea of spending all his time in a classroom. He substitute-taught during the off-season, and when he got a permanent job teaching chemistry at Prescott High School, he spent the next five summers working on wildfire engines. He used to teach a fire-science class at the high school, too, kept teaching it even after he went full-time with the fire department. A kid named Andrew Ashcraft took it the first year. He was a little guy but athletic, strong, one of the Energizer Bunny types. He's a Granite Mountain hotshot now, a strapping man of 29, married and tattooed, his four kids' names inked across his chest. Travis Turbyfill took his class, too. He was a machine gunner in the Marine Corps after high school, a platoon marksman, then came home to Prescott to fight wildfires. He's a squad leader with the hotshots, 27 years old, married, two little girls with strawberry-blond curls. Jackson calls his students his kids, like most teachers do. He's got a third one on Granite Mountain: Brendan McDonough.

Jackson has been working structure protection all day, helping spray down homes in the residential communities that had been threatened by the Yarnell Hill fire. Around five o'clock, his phone rings, a friend from the Prescott F.D. "You hear anything about a deployment?"

No, he hasn't. On a big fire with hundreds of personnel, it's nearly impossible for any one person to know everything that is happening in real time. Firefighters are spread over enormous distances, and even if the radios work perfectly, they're all on different channels. Transmissions are polluted with wind and static and background noise, and broken by ridges and gullies.

Everyone on Yarnell Hill knows the flames have run wild. They can see it, and on the main channels there is much concerned talk about how it's slopping over the firebreaks, spotting on the far side of Highway 89 even. But most people don't realize Granite Mountain is in trouble.

Jackson scans through the channels. He catches only snippets, fragments. He hears "…Granite Mountain IC…" and then he hears "…all accounted for, no injuries.…" In the moment he's pretty sure Granite Mountain is safe. Still, his phone keeps chirping, texts from friends and firefighters, all saying they're hearing bad things out of Yarnell.

While Jackson and his partner drive toward the command post, their supervisor intercepts them. He says there has been a deployment, fatalities. Once at the command post, Jackson notices none of the other guys are making eye contact with him. They recognize his face or see the Prescott logo and turn away, stare at the ground, look anywhere else.

Yeah, he thinks. It is us.He knows hotshots always stay together. It could be all of them.

He slumps against a rig. Jackson's fought hundreds of wildfires. Some guys deployed their shelters once, maybe twice, and he's seen people whacked by burnt-out trees toppling over in the black. Firefighters call them snags, and they fall silent as ghosts. A lot of guys get hurt that way. But he's never been there when anyone died.

He's staring at the ground or maybe nothing at all. There's movement in his peripheral vision, boots, a man walking out from behind a rig. He looks up. McDonough.

Jackson has never fainted before, but he suspects this is what it feels like right before it happens. He steadies himself, rises, goes to McDonough, wraps his arms around him and holds on. "I thought I'd lost all my boys," he whispers.

Men on foot and in a helicopter start searching for the hotshots at 5:16. They start at the anchor point Granite Mountain had built in the morning. A little more than an hour later, the medic in the helicopter sees the deployment site from the air.He lands, hikes up to where the hotshots are clustered together. Their shelters have mostly burned away. At 6:35, he radios in: nineteen confirmed fatalities. It is the worst loss of wildland firefighters in eighty years.

Darrell Willis retired as the Prescott fire chief in 2007 but came back and took over the wildland division. He'd never worked as a hotshot, not offcially, but he'd gone on a few assignments with Granite Mountain. Always awkward, he knows, traveling with the chief. "I told them, ‘Whatever firefighter number 20 would do, I'll do it,' " he says. "And they always took good care of Daddy." He'd talked to Marsh that morning, just long enough to get a briefing and tell him to stay safe.

The town of Yarnell in the wake of the fire.

Willis and a few other men wait out Sunday night at Boulder Springs Ranch. Danny Parker, with the Chino Valley Fire Department, is among them. His son, Wade, was Granite Mountain's rookie of the year in 2012. He was going to marry his high school sweetheart in October, have a bunch of kids, and lead the worship service at church someday. He was 22.

At daybreak, the men at the ranch drive into the canyon. A dozer had to cut a road through the blackened stumps and heat-spalled boulders in the canyon before the bodies could be retrieved. The bodies had all been bagged, and they were laid out in three tidy rows. "That's probably the worst nightmare I have," Willis says, weeks later, after all the memorials and funerals and honors for his dead men. "Every night. Nineteen orange body bags."

There is no protocol for removing nineteen corpses from the wreckage of a wildfire. It had never happened before, not in any living memory. So the recovery team improvises its own respectful retrieval.

Three Ford F-250s drive out the dozer road. Four men stand at the rear flanks of each one, two on a side, at attention and in salute. Four others gently carry the bodies, covered now by American flags the sheriff thought to bring, and load them into the beds. They return to Boulder Springs Ranch, where the vans from the medical examiner'soffce wait, one man riding in the back of each truck to make sure the flags don't flutter away. They make three trips, rotating who salutes and who carries, bringing two hotshots in each truck, and then a final journey, one pickup, to remove the last of the nineteen.

Jackson is in the caravan from Yarnell to Phoenix, where the bodies will be autopsied. They drive out Highway 89, south toward Wickenburg, and that's where the crowds begin. For miles, people line the highway, old people and young people, cops and firefighters and civilians, saluting or hands over hearts or just standing silently. The crowds thicken in Phoenix, the sidewalks jammed. Jackson has a hard time seeing through the tears in his eyes.

Blame

They were all proclaimed heroes, of course, which is almost certainly a word none of the Granite Mountain hotshots would have used to describe themselves.

Their job at times involved protecting homes and property from wildfires, but they would never knowingly risk death. There is a big poster, in fact, in Station 7, Granite Mountain's headquarters, making that point: Your life is more important than any structure! That said, hotshots want something wild to burn. When the season is slow and they're stuck at the station, hotshots get restless. They think: When we gonna get another fucking fire? And they rarely, if ever, worry about dying. "Even if I did some crazy assignment," says Mondo, "I never felt like, 'Oh, fuck, this could be the one.'"

A team of experts was assigned immediately after the fire to figure out what happened, to interview everyone who'd been there, review recordings and weather data, model wind patterns and fire behavior, to re-create the day as accurately as possible. That is painstaking and time-consuming work. So other theories were floated in the interim, any desperate attempt to attribute fault.

A state forestry offcial—who wasn't there and wasn't part of the investigation and knew nomore about the deaths than anyone else who'd read a wildfire-fighting handbook—told a reporter that Marsh was to blame for all nineteen deaths.As the summer wore on, there was speculation that the crew was unqualified and exhausted. Some people who'd never worked in Prescott wrongly suggested that Granite Mountain had been corrupted and compromised by the urban-firefighting philosophy of their department.

Brendan McDonough does not believe any of this is accurate. About a month before the Yarnell Hill Serious Accident Investigation report was released, Donut sat with me in a café in downtown Prescott. He was dog-tired, yawning through a late breakfast. He'd taped an interview with The Weather Channel early that morning, and he was trying to figure out counseling and benefits and how he was going to get paid so he could take care of his daughter. His phone rang often. "It'd probably be easier," he said at one point, "if I didn't have to keep talking about it every day."

So we talked mostly about him and how he became a hotshot and how the crew operated. He told a story from his first season, about an assignment in the steep and rugged Chiricahua Mountains along the Mexican border. It was only his second big fire. "Eric told me, ‘This is where hotshot dreams go to die,' " Donut said. "He said, ‘This is your true chance to prove yourself. This'll either break you or it'll make you stronger.' And I thought, you don't fucking let this man down."

McDonough knows his crew was fully qualified and properly rested on June 30, and he knows none of the Granite Mountain hotshots was reckless or foolhardy. But he does not know why those men, why his brothers, decided to hack through a canyon swamped with unburned fuel. He can't know, because he wasn't there.

And what if he had been? What if another man had been posted as lookout and Donut had stayed with the crew, had hiked to the saddle in the ridge above that canyon? He'd almost certainly be dead. Had any man on that crew felt threatened, McDonough said, had one of them doubted the chosen route, he would have spoken up. "Nineteen guys made that decision and took that choice," he said. "That's what people have to understand. You can't force someone to do that."

The investigation report was released on September 28. It mapped the winds of the outflow boundary, modeled how they blew fire around knolls and into bowls, detailed precisely how and when the Yarnell Hill fire exploded. It noted there was a half-hour gap in communication from the Granite Mountain hotshots, which is not at all uncommon when men are hiking and assume themselves to be safe. It cataloged how much each man's helmet had melted and how much of their shelters had burned away.

The investigators also concluded the hotshots "did not perceive excessive risk in repositioning to Boulder Springs Ranch." And they blamed no one.

"The first time I met Eric, I wanted to be on his good side," says Phillip "Mondo" Moldonado. "He didn't say much, but what he did say, he said a lot in it. Every word he said, you'd better listen."

The great cloud of smoke leaning north begins to straighten. It rises, rears back like a soft gray giant gently stretching its back.

The slopes and canyons near Yarnell hadn’t burned since 1966,so they were thick with chaparral, in places ten feet high and impassably dense and all of it desiccated by years of drought.

WIND

No Cause for Alarm

Two days before the inferno, on the evening of Friday June 28, lighting struck Yarnell Hill. The incident was typical for Arizona's monsoon season (June—September) and ignited an uneventful fire that only smoldered at first, covering less than a half-mile in twenty-four hours. But when winds picked up the next day, things changed and the hotshots were called to the scene.